Forbes_USA_June_13_2017

ENTREPRENEURS
SMALL GIANTS
Lightbulb Moment
It took a trip to China for the founders of
Green Creative to spot an LED-bulb niche in the U.S.
BY JEFF KAUFLIN
Haute lighting: Guillaume
Vidal (left) and Cole Zucker
design their own lights,
comparing the process of
adding components to that
of a chef mixing ingredients.
As Cole Zucker drives through San Francisco’s
Mission District in his white
BMW M4, he uses one hand to steer
through busy intersections and the
other to flip through women’s profiles on a dating
app. It’s a big change from the weekday evenings in
the spring of 2011, when Zucker would drive his
Mazda 3 the roughly 40 miles from San Francisco
to San Jose and park on a residential street around
midnight. He’d get into the backseat, hang clothes
over the windows for privacy and go to sleep. Four
hours later, knowing it was the best time to catch
them, he’d walk into one office building after an-
other, looking for building engineers
who might want to
buy his startup’s lighting products.
Nearly every one of them
turned him away.
Six years later, Zucker, 33,
and his 35-year-old cofounder,
Guillaume Vidal, are co-CEOs
of Green Creative, a profitable
lighting manufacturer with 70
employees and $52 million in
revenue. Their bulbs illuminate
the aisles of many Walmart,
Whole Foods and J. Crew
stores. In a market dominated
by Philips, GE and Osram Sylvania,
Vidal and Zucker saw an
opening when LED technology
started to take off. They bet
that the giant firms were illequipped
to make the most of
the rapidly evolving technology.
“We used to worry about
whether anyone would buy
LED products,” Zucker says.
“Now we worry about how
to maintain our breakneck
growth rate.”
The big draw of LED bulbs,
of course, is efficiency. They
use up to 75% less energy than
incandescent ones and last
25 times longer. Even today,
LEDs represent less than 10%
of the U.S. market, but they’re
gaining fast.
Around the time LEDs
started to catch on, Zucker
was fired as a fixed-income
research associate at Prudential.
He had entrepreneurial aspirations
and became fixated
on China. To his parents’ dismay,
Zucker, who had studied Mandarin in college,
moved to Shanghai in 2007 with $3,500 in savings
and no prospects. He eventually secured a job in
sales for a lighting and flooring company.
Vidal, who is from the South of France, started
working in marketing in 2004 at a Hong Kong
supply- chain company, helping clients with everything
from shipping and logistics to finding lighting
manufacturers. Two years later, he was opening
a new office in Shanghai. “It’s Asia,” he says. “As
soon as you have a little bit of understanding or
people start trusting you, they will just throw crazy
opportunities at you.”
TIMOTHY ARCHIBALD FOR FORBES
58 | FORBES JUNE 13, 2017